November 19, 2012

THEY DON’T CALL IT THE “STUPID PARTY” FOR NOTHING: Republican Study Committee Disowns Intellectual Property Paper. Opposing protectionist IP would help with younger voters, tech-libertarian types. It also cuts against the interest of industries — Big Entertainment, basically — that are the Dems’ key cash cow. It should be a no-brainer for the GOP, but instead, apparently, the GOP has decided not to have a brain.

Clearly Republicans aren’t quite ready to have this fight with the content lobbies quite yet.

But the fact that the paper got published at all in the first place is notable, as was the rapturous way it was received across the web. There’s a real constituency for this kind of reform. And it’s part and parcel of VM‘s own reform hobbyhorse: promoting smarter, leaner, and more efficient government. Copyright law has been bloated beyond its initial, limited and useful purpose into something way beyond what the Founding Fathers intended.

We encourage VM readers to take a look at the entire policy paper, hosted here by the Maryland Pirate Party. This is certainly not the last we’ll hear of these kinds of initiatives. GOPers shocked by the last election are worrying that the Party of Lincoln is becoming the Party of Out of Touch Middle Aged Men; copyright reform is an issue where the GOP potentially could be siding with the young and the hip against the Hollywood power elite.

If the GOP can’t break with the corporate money machines and the Status Quo Lobby on an issue like this one, you have to wonder what the party’s capacity to lead and to innovate really is.